Spiceworks is a free “everything IT” Help Desk tool that delivers nearly everything you need as an IT pro to simplify your job. Designed for small and medium sized businesses, the Spiceworks easy-to-use interface combines network inventory, monitoring, troubleshooting and reporting with an easy to use help desk ticketing system. And, it connects you with a community of over half-a-million other IT pros to share ideas, best practices and product recommendations, and in the spirit of helping each other solve problems and make the IT day easier. It takes about 5 minutes to set up, has a simple interface, and doesn’t use agents to discover your machines.

The Spiceworks community is absolutely amazing. Top-notch, dedicated people all helping each other out. I really enjoy participating in the community. The browser-based interface actually has a button for “Ask a Question” and another for “Answer Questions”. There are also dozens of topic groups to which you can subscribe, and there are product reviews, “best-of” lists, and everything you can imagine that is IT-related.

Finally, it is free. That’s it. Simple. If you try it out you won’t believe it’s free. Last year I installed Spiceworks at a brand new IT job the week before a regulatory audit. I had everything I needed for hardware and software inventories, antivirus and the like within one day, workstations and servers included! During the 5 day audit I turned to Spiceworks several more times for quick, on the fly reports that got the job done.

Give yourself a break, and be recognized as the shining IT Star that you are. Try Spiceworks today!